This article both argues for and contests the discourses of transformation that characterize the production and reception of neo-burlesque striptease. Through an experiential, ethnographic, and critical methodology, I reflect on how this genre engenders performances of transformation through the passage of dress to undress, at the performer–spectator exchange, and through shifting corporeal values, changing representations of female eroticism and the reclaiming of a nostalgic femininity within the neo-burlesque mise-en-scène. Yet in line with critical debates in cultural studies, I seek to question the extent to which utopian notions of transformation occur beyond the level of the “performance text” to incorporate change in the economic and social realities of neo-burlesque performers and audiences. In response I argue that neo-burlesque striptease is a site of class privilege in which performers have the necessary economic and intellectual capital through which to stage a critique of the striptease body, which could not necessarily be replicated in other sites of production. Yet I also recognize that neo-burlesque performance offers important opportunities for personal and social transformation through the ways in which women experience their disrobed bodies in an affirmative public space and through the creative control they exercise in the construction of their bodily display.

Where is expression in Cunningham's choreography? Are the moving bodies on stage expressive? If so, what are they expressing and how does such expression occur? Several of the finest theorists of dance—among them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds—have already approached the question of expressivity in the work of Merce Cunningham. Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they nonetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the “affective significance” as opposed to the “emotional experience” of movement (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an “energy source … more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing subject's sensorimotor “faculties” as they are deployed “fully in the present” (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has defined expression in dance as an intrinsic and inevitable quality of movement, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic process. As a critical theorist (rather than a dance historian), I am interested in expression as a more general, or cross-media, category and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to free it from its subservience to the psyche, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive. I have become increasingly convinced that Cunningham's practical and theoretical interventions can illuminate more traditional literary and philosophical discourses on the aesthetics of expression and that they have particular resonance when juxtaposed with the approach to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory of 1970. Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of “expression” by shifting its location from subjectivity, understood primarily as a psychic phenomenon, to embodiment, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual existence (in Franko's words, “something more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” [1995, 80]).

Europeans have imagined India as a land of fabulous riches and exotic legends since the time of ancient Greece. In Greek mythology Dionysus, the god of passion and wine, was said to have come from India, and Alexander the Great's proudest achievement was arriving at the banks of the Indus. When, after 1498, explorers from Portugal, Holland, England, Denmark, and France began to establish trade links with the subcontinent, it seemed the legends were true; rare spices, silks, gold, and precious stones were transported to Europe and added fuel to already inflamed imaginations. The very name of the city of Golconda became a synonym for unimaginable wealth. There was confusion between all things exotic or “oriental.” Turks, Africans, Persians, American “Indians,” and Caribbeans were all from the same imaginary region, “the Indies,” which existed more in the poetic fantasies of Europeans than on a geographical map.

As early as 1626 at the court of Louis XIII, king of France, the mysterious figure of Asia appeared in the Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, a ballet danced by the king and his noble companions. In 1635 The Temple of Love, a court masque (as le ballet du cour was known in England), was presented at Whitehall Palace in London. In this spectacle, Persian youths voyaged to India to encounter Indamora, Queen of Narasinga, danced by Queen Henrietta Maria herself in a costume designed by Inigo Jones. Back in France, a Sanjac Indien represented the continent of Asia in another court ballet, Les Entretiens de la Fontaine de Vaucluse (1649).

Arnold Genthe's 1915 photograph of Anna Pavlova, taken as she leaps into the air, is perhaps the earliest photograph of free movement in dance (Fig. 1). Unlike many other early images, with long exposure times necessitating static poses or wires to hold up the dancers, this photograph depicts actual movement. This claim to authenticity and actuality is a powerful part of its appeal; looking at the image, viewers are sure that they are witnesses to a faithful reproduction of Pavlova dancing, that they are seeing the dance of the past. Considered in this manner, the photograph is an example of the revelatory power of the camera to show us what has been.

However, Genthe's photograph is not a powerful image simply because it is, authentically, of a dancer in motion. It might have mechanically frozen its subject in time, but the photograph communicates movement beyond the moment it depicts—beyond, in a sense, what it reveals photographically to what it evokes in the mind of the viewer. Viewers are able to see movement in details indicative of motion: the flowing fabric of the costume, Pavlova's bodily posture with raised and powerfully muscled thigh, the elevated arm gestures, and the sharply bent and thrusting toes. Additionally, the degree of blur in the photograph provides an indistinctness that is suggestive of something in motion; oddly, the partial obscurity of the picture prompts viewers to imagine more than they can see. All of these elements are evocative indications of movement; they are neither documentary nor part of what can be called photographic revelation, but are instead representational.

In this article, I investigate the historical precedents of site-adaptive dance. After walking through the mobility discourse as applied to site-specific art by such scholars as Miwon Kwon, Fiona Wilkie, and Victoria Hunter, I examine the mobile site works of North American choreographers Ann Carlson, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, Eiko & Koma, and Stephan Koplowitz as exemplary of early attempts to take site dance on tour. Finally, I argue for the value of employing the lens of adaptation to analyze such works, both for the field of site performance and for the larger cross-disciplinary dialogues that could be activated.

One at a time, the dancers entered the small chapel and crossed the green shag carpet to kneel before the virgin's portrait. For the three days of religious fiesta, her image would be the focus of the dancers' offerings. A faded color reproduction, the portrait was not honored for its aesthetic virtues. Rather, its significance was invocative and evocative: through it, the virgin's presence was invoked and her story evoked.

About four feet high, the virgin's portrait rested on a papier maché mountain half its size. On a lower ridge of the mountain was a statue of a kneeling man, cast in plaster. The man's size was equal to the mountain's so that his head reached the level of the virgin's knees. The overall effect was that the virgin on high looked down with compassion on a tiny mountain and a larger-than-life man. It was the opposite of traditional images of Mary looking up at Christ on the cross. Here, the man looked up from below at Mary (figure 1).

Since contact improvisation was “invented” in North America in the 1970s, it has gained widespread acceptance; teachers have been travelling extensively to conduct seminars and workshops. The dance form has been documented and researched from several viewpoints, but, as I see it, there is general agreement among practitioners and scholars—including United Kingdom-based Helen Thomas (2003), Norway-based Hilde Rustad (2006) and Eli Torvik (2005), and Cynthia Novack (1990), who worked in the United States—that contact improvisation is a form of nonhierarchical relations that entails an appeal to accept mutual responsibility for each other and that also implies a specific lifestyle. In her book Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Novack, as an anthropologist, perceives contact improvisation as embodied culture where the movements are central constitutional parts. Her position is that through the study of contact improvisation, “the history of the dancing serves as a vehicle for investigating powerful interrelationships of body, movement, dance and society” (8).

This article investigates the three versions of Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (Witch Dance) in the context of the different political regimes in which they were performed. The changing cultural milieus shaped—through Wigman's imagination if not necessarily consciously—the works' forms and iconographies. The witch figure relates to preindustrial, pre-Christian Germanic identity and sparked considerable interest among völkisch and indeed Nazi groups. Wigman's dances present a kaleidoscope of different treatments of the witch motif, encompassing (variously) the life reform movement, an intercultural fusion with oriental performance traditions, and a strand of paganism that also influenced National Socialism. They converge, however, around a unifying critique of modernity.

In this article, I specify and historicize the modes of communication that were at play among practitioners of contact improvisation+ and between the dancers and their audiences throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. I argue that contact improvisation's turn away from dance as a performed visual medium and toward the tactile experience of the participants exceeds a phenomenological reading and instead needs to be considered in light of anarchist theories of mutual assistance in which group behavior supports individual development. At the same time, however, Steve Paxton, the founder of the form, became concerned precisely with its opacity for an audience. I locate this ambivalent engagement with the performance of a participatory action in the edited video recordings that Paxton made together with Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, and Steve Christiansen. These mediated videos, aligned with the rise of video art, paradoxically aim to spark a stronger connection than Paxton thought was possible during the live demonstrations of the form.

Recent scientific research provides evidence to suggest that it is more than coincidental that principles of training are held in common by Tai Chi, Sweigard's Ideokinesis, and Bartenieff's Fundamentals. The reason that principles of training for the neuromuscular facilitation of human movement can be found to cross diverse methods and forms of training is, quite simply, that they work. This statement comes as no surprise to individuals who have utilized these principles of training. However, only recently has objective scientific evidence been published that suggests the potential efficacy of this kind of training. Beyond comparing principles of training and current scientific research, the purpose of this paper is to build a testable hypothesis that can provide a focus in dance science for the beginnings of experimentation in neuromuscular facilitation training.

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.

Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.

This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.

In everyday thinking art is very often linked to emotion and, more generally, to a kind of emotional and spontaneous way of relating to the world that contrasts with the rational and controlled intellect that, for example, science is understood to cultivate. Emotion is also commonly linked, via bodily existence, to femininity and the private sphere—the home (see, for example, Heinämaa and Reuter 1994; Sihvola 1999. These conceptualizations reveal a tendency toward typically Western dichotomies between art and science, emotion and reason, body and mind, private and public, and woman and man (see also Domagalski 1999; Sandelans and Boudens 2000).

Furthermore, working life and emotion have long been seen as separate; only emotion-free employees and institutions have been perceived as being efficient because emotional control, self-restraint, and rationality bolster stability and predictability in working life. Thus, emotions belong somewhere else. In fact, Lloyd Sandelans and Connie Boudens (2000, 48) note that we have had the habit of building special quarters for the exercise and display of emotion such as concert halls, movie theaters, football fields, and therapist's offices. This does not mean, however, that emotions can be eliminated from working life, as many studies on emotion at work have shown (Ashkanasy, Hartel, and Zerbe 2000; Fineman 2000, 2003; Hochschild 1983).

In 1917 Margaret H'Doubler, on a year's leave from the University of Wisconsin, had been given a difficult assignment. Blanche Trilling, her chairman, had asked if she would search the dance studios in New York City for a kind of dance activity “worth a college woman's time.” Studying philosophy that year at Columbia University, Margaret H'Doubler had complied with pronounced lack of enthusiasm, her predominant interest being in teaching basketball. Her time nearly expired, she found herself, however, suddenly excited when, at the music school of Alys Bentley, she saw children on the floor moving in their own ways to a stimulus provided by the teacher.

“Of course,” she recounted later, “Get on the floor where you are relieved from the pull of gravity … and see what the natural, structural movements are.” She continued to visit Miss Bentley's studio during the short time that remained and began to organize a course in “new dancing” to be offered almost immediately in summer school in Madison.

Zurich Dada had a profound impact on twentieth-century dance, bringing new possibilities to a rapidly changing field. The Dadaist performance ideas were mainly drawn from pre-World War I artistic movements—Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. Coming together during World War I in Zurich, the artists and writers who made up the group found themselves loosely unified in a desire to destroy traditional forms of expression and build a society based on a purer vision encompassed in new artistic forms. The intensity of time and place—a small city far from the immediate battles of the war—allowed for an exchange of ideas that reactivated, integrated and reshaped the pre-World War I manifestoes and experiments of the various art movements.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's French empire conquered much of Europe, the German patriot Friedrich Ludwig Jahn invented the first German national gymnastics program known as Turnen. The idea was to create a new German body and a new form of national discipline. Walking for bodily fitness, to instill national awareness, training on special equipment and rediscovering ancient German dance forms all became part of the new body culture. It is out of this movement with its nationalist and later racist culture that much of the modern gymnastics and dance movements in Germany gained their ideologies. This article sketches some stages of this social and physical continuity, from the resistance to the French to the establishment of the racial state in 1933 and to the provision of a Nazi aesthetic by German modern dancers.

Prompted by Achille Mbembe's reading of how racial assignation functions, this article examines the recurrences of two blackface ballet characters, the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade and the Blackamoor in Petrouchka, on twentieth and twenty-first-century dance stages, in exhibits, research, and pedagogy. The company that first performed these racist stereotypes, the Ballets Russes, has been canonized as crucial to the emergence of modernism in the performing arts more generally, although consistently Orientalized in the process. The designation of works revolving around racist stereotypes as “masterpieces,” and their constant reiteration, amounts to complicity with racism that is not limited to ballet stages.

Martha Graham writes in her autobiography Blood Memory that she was bewildered, or, as she puts it “bemused,” when she heard how dancers referred to her school as “the house of the pelvic truth” (Graham 1991, 211). We might perhaps agree with Graham that this is not the best description for a highly respected center of modern dance training; neither does it match Graham's image as an awe-inspiring and exacting teacher, nor does it suit the seriousness with which her tough technique is regarded. But the house of the pelvic truth does chime with stories about Graham's often frank method of addressing her students. She is reputed to have told one young woman not to come back to the studio until she had found herself a man. At other times she would tell her female students, “you are simply not moving your vagina” (211). Add to this other stories about the men in the company suffering from “vagina envy” (211), and it can be readily understood that the goings-on in the Graham studio gave rise to its nickname, “house of the pelvic truth.”

In British dance circles of the 1960s, it was not rumors of the erotic that attracted most of us to Graham's work or persuaded us to travel to New York in search of the Graham technique. There was little in the way of contemporary dance training in Britain at this time, and we had been mesmerized by the beautiful and rather chaste film A Dancer's World (1957), in which Graham pronounces: a dancer is not a phenomenon … not a phenomenal creature.… I think he is a divine normal. He does what the human body is capable of doing. Now this takes time…it takes about ten years of study. This does not mean he won't be dancing before that time, but it does take the pressure of time, so that the house of the body can hold its divine tenant, the spirit. (1962, 24)